I'm very happy to let you know that our friends who have created Google Maps have released an API so that you can post interactive, draggable, zoomable, maps (with satellite imagery) on your personal websites.

As mentioned earlier, we're able to involve 410 students in this year's Summer of Code. We've sent out letters of congratulations to those people, and we hope everyone will join us in congratulating them.

It's unfortunate we weren't able to include more of the almost 9,000 applications -- there were so many students that the mentoring organizations would have liked to work with. We hope to continue Summer of Code in upcoming years, and if we're able to do so, we hope to hear from all of you again. Thanks for all your hard work!

We've updated both Sparse Hashtable and Perftools, mostly to fix a bug or two that showed up in different distributions. If you have not checked out these tools before, and are into C++ and threads, be sure to do so, they're quite useful.

AJAXSLT is an implementation of XSL-T in JavaScript, intended for use in fat web pages, which are nowadays referred to as AJAX applications. Because XSL-T uses XPath, it is also an implementation of XPath that can be used independently of XSL-T.

The Java client library for the AdWords API makes it easier to write Java clients to programmatically access AdWords accounts. The client library is provided in a single jar file that contains all the Apache Axis jars and pre-compiled stub classes needed to write Java clients.

After spot reviewing the applications we've received for the Summer of Code, we were struck with their high quality. As a result, we were able to increase the funds available to support 400 students, double our original number of 200. While this doesn't allow us to take all applicants, we thought that this would be a terrific thing to do for the mentoring organizations, the students, open source software and computer science.

We are no longer taking applications for the Summer of Code. Google and the mentoring organizations will now take on the job of selecting 200 participants from the over 8700 applications to the program. We are (literally!) overwhelmed with terrific applications and want to thank everyone who applied, we wish we could accept everyone.

Approval and rejection letters will be sent out over the next 10 days. Because of the volume of applications that we must process we cannot send a personal rejection letter for every application.

We're very happy to be putting up the first of what we hope is a growing list of those who are using Google Sitemaps in interesting ways. If we are missing your work and would like us to add it to the list, let us know about it.

We also wanted to give a short update on the progress of the Summer of Code. We've passed over 5400 applications for the 200 slots currently available, and we're seeing some very good quality applications! The application deadline is June 14th, so if you haven't applied and you want to, be sure to do so before then.

Today, Google launched Google Sitemaps, a new service designed for webmasters that enables them to automatically submit their web pages to Google. It is meant to provide Google with more information about web content so we can improve search results for users worldwide. As part of this launch, we're releasing Sitemap Generator, an open source tool that generates an XML sitemap for a few simple use cases and thus shows developers how to create these files programmatically.

The Summer of Code sure is something. The response from the open source community and, more importantly, future open source developer community has been very positive. I wanted to thank everyone involved so far. So...Thanks! We've added a few more FAQ questions and things are humming along nicely. If you are 18 or older, and a student, and you haven't checked it out, you should!

We are -extremely- pleased with the number of applications and interest the Summer of Code has received. We've added over 20 mentoring organizations and a bunch of faq entries. Check it out! Serious stuff.... GAIM, OpenOffice, NMAp, FreeBSD, Drupal, Fedora Core...Something for everyone!